Kenny Ausubel of Bioneers – Imagining Our Way Out of the Unimaginable

Kenny Ausubel is an award-winning social entrepreneur, author, journalist and filmmaker. He is the Founder and CEO of Bioneers, the internationally recognized nonprofit dedicated to disseminating breakthrough solutions for restoring people and planet. He launched the annual Bioneers Conference in 1990 with his business partner and wife Nina Simons, Bioneers Co-Founder and President.

Kenny is a writer, filmmaker and media professional. Since 2004, he has served as executive producer and co-writer of the award-winning international radio series The Bioneers: Revolution From the Heart of Nature. He acted as a central advisor to Leonardo DiCaprio’s feature documentary, The 11th Hour, and appears in the film.

He has written four books and edited several volumes of the Bioneers anthology book series. His most recent book Dreaming the Future: Reimagining Civilization in the Age of Nature (Chelsea Green 2012) won the Nautilus Grand Gold prize in the Ecology-Environment category. He writes for the Huffington Post.

Since 1990, Bioneers has acted as a fertile hub of social and scientific innovators with practical and visionary solutions for the world’s most pressing environmental and social challenges. Subscribe to the Bioneers Radio Series, available on iTunes and other podcast providers and on your local radio station.

Opening Remarks from the 2016 Bioneers Conference

“If we appear to seek the unattainable, then let it be known that we do so to avoid the unimaginable.” So wrote Tom Hayden in the Port Huron Statementthat launched the world-changing 1960s student movement and defined a generation.

As Mark Twain reputedly quipped, “History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” In today’s resonant era of epic change, the unimaginable is the perfect storm of climate disruption and extreme inequality colliding with our brittle global civilization.

Our challenge is to imagine our way out of the unimaginable. As Michael Meade reminds us, “The deepest power of the human soul is imagination. When human beings bring imagination to the situation, we join the agents of creation.”

The years from now through 2020 will be the decisive window to re-imagine civilization in the Age of Nature — to begin to reverse climate disruption, restore the natural systems on which all life depends, and effectively address global inequality and injustice.

The solutions residing in nature surpass our conception of what’s even possible. Nature has a profound and mysterious capacity for healing. We’re learning to work with nature to heal nature, and in the process, heal ourselves.

But this transformation will take far more than technical solutions. It calls for a fundamentally different way of seeing and being. Carl Jung called this kind of civilizational threshold “kairos,” an ancient Greek idea that means the right moment for a changing of the gods — a shift in our fundamental worldview, principles and paradigms.

We’re living in a time of great awakening: the realization that everything is connected — that ecological healing and social justice are one notion, indivisible. We can have peace with the Earth only when we practice justice with each other, a process that will never end.

If we’re to survive as a civilization, we’re called upon to heal our deep social wounds and divisions from a place of beloved community. Today that beloved community must extend beyond the human to the entire Earth community.

Twenty-seven years ago, the founding premise of Bioneers was that the solutions are largely present, or at least we know what directions to head in. Today that’s both more and less true. On the one hand, a growing constellation of visionary innovators has illuminated a landscape riotously alive with solutions both visionary and practical. We’re way down the pike blazing new directions, some of which are starting to move the mainstream.

On the other hand, unattended problems such as climate disruption have morphed into predicaments with no ready fix or near-term solution. Like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, we’ve unleashed forces far beyond our control. Global weirding is unraveling life as we’ve known it.

Everything is going to change. The only question is how. That’s where we bioneers come in.

What we’re witnessing today is a genuinely unprecedented conjunction of movements. People are coming together across diverse issues and difficult differences and divides to make common cause to restore nature and our human communities.

Colette Pichon Battle of the Gulf Coast Center for Law & Policy says this:, “People are saying, ‘I see you. I hear you. Let’s work together to figure this out.’ To really advance equity, The Climate movement needs to meet the Black Lives Matter movement. The Gender Justice movement needs to meet the Indigenous movement. We’ve got to start intersecting on purpose.”

They say the best way to predict the future is to create it. Large and rapidly growing movements are reimagining how to fast-forward the transition off fossil fuels, build green infrastructures and economies, and scale resilience strategies. Simultaneously, people are reimagining how to overcome inequality, racism, sexism and the democracy deficit.

Our charge in these fateful coming years is to turn moments into movements — and to convert movements into lasting systemic and structural change in law, policy, governance and culture.

So, you might ask, if all these solutions are on tap, why haven’t they been implemented more widely?

We’ve not developed ways as a society to think about long-term change. As Farhad Manjoo observes about today’s future-shocked world, “Crises are arising daily from our collective inability to deal with ever-faster change. Technology is altering the world. National governments are in a slow-moving war for dominance with a handful of the most powerful corporations the world has ever seen — all of which happen to be tech companies.

“We now have ‘future blindness’ in the headlights of a tomorrow pushed by a few large corporations and shaped by the inescapable logic of hyper-efficiency.”

The rhinoceros in the room — with no disrespect to rhinoceri — is corporate power.

The current level of corporate and financial concentration is unprecedented. We’re living on a giant Monopoly board.

· Ten corporations control virtually all US military contracting, half the semiconductor and chip markets, and 73% of global auto sales.

· Eight companies own nearly all US broadcast and cable networks.

· Five banks control about half of all US banking assets, higher than in 2008.

· Four corporations own 83.5% of the beef market, and 60% of the hog and broiler chicken industries.

· Three control 99% of the US pharmaceutical market.

· Two dominate global aircraft manufacturing.

· One, Google, has up to 90% of online searches globally outside China.

If you’re waiting for a partridge in a pear tree, the list goes on — and on. When people say “free markets,” ask if “free” is a verb.

Monopoly is disastrous for the economy. Lack of competition raises prices and lowers wages. It stifles innovation and entrepreneurship. Customers have nowhere else to go, so service can and does suck.

These cartels also have a monopoly on political power. Punch your ticket to the “democracy theme park.”

The occult technology of monopoly power runs on systemic collusion and interlocking networks of management and control. In 2011, three systems analysts at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich mapped the towering edifice of global economic power. They built the first-ever in-depth international model of who owns what and what their revenues are.

Just 737 interlocking networks control 80% of global corporate economic activity. Just 147 corporate entities control 40% of wealth in the network.

Some behavior is out-and-out criminal according to existing statutes. Most of it is murky or technically legal, costing the rest of us trillions of losses in taxation and retail costs. What’s most criminal is what isn’t considered a crime.

Hiding large sums in fake shell companies is the nervous system of how global power elites operate.

The U.S. ranks third in the world in financial secrecy, almost as good a haven as Panama and the Cayman Islands. So many of the world’s most powerful groups benefit that no one in power remotely wants a transparent system.

Legal corruption includes the titanic “income defense industry” to shield profits and wealth from taxation and scrutiny. The Tax Justice Networkestimates that up to $32 trillion is stashed away in tax havens globally.

If all the Fortune 500 companies paid taxes on their sheltered profits, the government would garner a whopping $717 billion in revenues. The entire 2015 US federal budget deficit was $438 billion.

The list of illegal activities is so long that you could make a dent in deforestation by recycling the shredded documents. The scale is like a cartoon super-villain.

When these companies do get busted, it’s a corporate catch-and-release program with a fine that’s like a stingy tip for a royal banquet. Only minor employees are ever punished. Usually only the whistle blowers land in real trouble.

About 2/3 of the world’s CO2 and methane emissions dating back to the birth of the industrial era have been the responsibility of just 90 corporations. These “carbon majors” now face serious liability: fraud and civil conspiracy charges for funding climate-deniers while internally acknowledging the chilling science of global warming. They also bear a severe market risk: the inevitable global transition off fossil fuels. They will fight to the bottom of the 55-gallon barrel. The world is at stake.

This corporate racketeering is principally what stands in the way of implementing real solutions to create a restored world. The system is the crime.

The only way to arrest a vicious circle is with an intervention. Too-big-to-fail or too-big-to-jail means too big and go to jail. A growing movement is rising to revoke corporate personhood and corporate rights. A complementary movement is seeding a distributed clean economy with democratized ownership founded in values of ecological wellbeing and the public good.

As Buckminster Fuller Institute Board Chair David McConville points out, scientists warn that we’re “tipping toward the unknown in a high-stakes game of unwittingly crossing planetary boundaries of the safe operating space of humanity. When we return to our senses, we actually find this is still the only place we’ve discovered that supports life. We’re all indigenous earthlings.”

It’s objectifying and commodifying nature that has led us to this precipice of the unimaginable. We need to institute legally enforceable Rights for Nature.

Meanwhile our very understanding of nature is undergoing an epochal paradigm revolution. Says anthropologist Jeremy Narby, “Scientists are starting to talk like shamans, and shamans are starting to talk like scientists.

“Science has looked at nature as a bunch of objects that do things automatically without intelligence or consciousness. What shamans and indigenous cultures have been saying for a long time is increasingly confirmed in scientific research: There are persons in these other beings with intelligence, intentions and consciousness.”

Over the past two decades there has been a revolution in vegetal biology. Science now shows that plants appear to be sentient beings. They perceive light, smell, touch, water and many more variables than we do. They can learn, remember, and communicate. They exhibit the traits we associate with personhood.

Experimental science has confirmed that plants can see when you’re standing next to them, and the color of your shirt. They don’t have eyes, but they have the same photoreceptor proteins all over their bodies that humans have at the back of the retina.

Plants don’t have brains, but they translate information into electrical-chemical signals in their cells identical to the ones used by our own neurons. “A plant may not have a brain, but it acts like a brain,” says Narby. “The word ‘neuron’ comes from the Greek for ‘vegetal fiber.’ Neurons actually look like the cut of the inside of a plant.”

Research over the past 30 years has illuminated a profound intelligence throughout nature. Dolphins and many other animals recognize themselves in a mirror, long a scientific measure of intelligence. Pigeons have better memory for paintings than do college students. Sheep have better memory of human faces than humans have. Bees that are invertebrates with brains the size of a grain of sugar can consistently process abstract concepts in tests that require perceiving difference and sameness.

But you gotta give it up slime molds. In every single test, these single-celled, brainless mucus-like blobs that can reach the size of a human hand perfectly solve mazes, another measure of intelligence. Slime molds are so expert at setting up intelligent tubing networks that biomimetic researchers are studying them to successfully design solutions to traffic problems and pipeline architecture.

The word “intelligence” is derived from the Latin meaning “to choose between” — to make decisions. Clearly intelligence is pervasive throughout nature, and it’s high time to expand our view of personhood to the natural world — and not to corporations.

This is what a scientific revolution looks like in real time.

As Narby concludes, “There seems to be intelligence in nature, but there is certainly stupidity in culture. All kinds of poor decisions are made by human beings. An intelligent species does not eat itself out of house and home. It does not pollute its own home. We are a young species whose capacity to store knowledge in culture and language turbo-charged our capacity to dominate other species. It’s like an adolescent being promoted to President of the United States. What’s on the menu for us is to become mature. We’ve got to learn fast.”

All this begs the ultimate mystery of consciousness itself. As the biologist Lyall Watson put it, “We did not come into this world. We came out of it, like buds out of branches and butterflies out of cocoons. We are a natural product of this earth, and if we turn out to be intelligent beings, then it can only be because we are fruits of an intelligent earth, which is nourished in turn by an intelligent system of energy.”

We don’t have a clue what consciousness is. Emergent theories in neuroscience and newly energized philosophical traditions suggest it’s an intrinsic property throughout nature and the cosmos.

Leading neuroscientist and consciousness researcher Christof Koch went to India to explore this mystery with the Dalai Lama. The two concurred on almost every point. Commented Dr. Koch. “I was confronted with the Buddhist teaching that sentience is probably everywhere at varying levels. When I see insects in my home, I don’t kill them.”

In closing, I’d like to share the words of author and Indigenous activist Penny Opal Plant.

“Human beings imagined all the things that are wrong. We made it up. Now it’s time for us to imagine the world beyond all of the harms. That’s the most exciting part of our job. Our collective imagining of the future, of tomorrow — it’s just tomorrow, it’s right there. I can taste it. I can feel it. I can see it. We can do this. This is what we get to do!”

Mind blowing talk from Paul Stamets, EcoFarm Conference Keynote 2017

Paul Stamets, speaker, author, mycologist, medical researcher and entrepreneur, is considered an intellectual and industry leader in fungi habitat, medicinal use, and production. He lectures extensively to deepen your understanding and respect for the organisms that literally exist under every footstep you take on this path of life. His presentations cover a range of mushroom species and research showing how mushrooms can help the health of people and planet. His central premise is that habitats have immune systems, just like people, and mushrooms are cellular bridges between the two. Our close evolutionary relationship to fungi can be the basis for novel pairings in the microbiome that lead to greater sustainability and immune enhancement.

Timothy Bloxam Morton (born 19 June 1968)[1] is Professor and Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University.[2] A member of the object-oriented philosophy movement, Morton’s work explores the intersection of object-oriented thought and ecological studies. Morton’s use of the term ‘hyperobjects’ was inspired by Björk’s 1996 single ‘Hyperballad’ although the term ‘Hyper-objects’ (denoting n-dimensional non-local entities) has also been used in computer science since 1967. Morton uses the term to explain objects so massively distributed in time and space as to transcend localization, such as climate change and styrofoam.[3]
Morton has also written extensively about the literature of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Shelley, Romanticism, diet studies, and ecotheory.[4]

A groundbreaking walking audio book project that brings to life the Earth’s 4.6 billion year story has launched a Heritage Lottery Fund-backed £20,000 crowdfunding appeal – to increase its impact in raising environmental awareness, help train future ecologists and encourage people to look after the planet.

Deep Time Walk is the world’s first interactive mobile app of its kind. It allows people to take a 4.6 kilometre walk ­– anywhere in the world – to learn and experience a detailed, dramatized journey of Earth’s Big History, from the planet’s formation to the present day.

By walking across Earth’s geological timeline – with every metre of the walk representing a million years – the app’s users gain a vivid perspective of the planet’s immense age. Afterwards, they can learn more and join with others to take positive environmental action.

Innovative technology and the latest geoscience evidence are combined with an entertaining narrative ­voiced by actors from television programmes and movies including Doctor Who, Sherlock, The Bill, Silent Witness, and Love Actually.

“Deep Time Walk is about creating a sense of awe and wonder. By demonstrating how the Earth is a precious living environment from which all life has emerged – and that all human history has unfolded in the blink of a geological eye – we want to inspire more people to take care of this special place we all call home,” said project leader Geoff Ainscow.

“We now need people’s help to take this exciting, cutting edge initiative for environmental awareness to a new level, and every pound given towards our crowdfunding appeal is being matched by the Heritage Lottery Fund up to £10,000.”

Raising £20,000 will enable Deep Time Walk to become a self-sustainable social enterprise – with profits reinvested and used to fund scholarships at Schumacher College, an international centre for nature-based learning located in Dartington, South Devon.

Funds will also enable the project to reach a larger global audience – including through a new website with opportunities for people to learn more and to take environmental action in their communities, and through a new video and expanded social media activities.

Rewards for crowdfunding supporters include packs of beautiful Strata Cards, designed with unique images matched to 100 million year periods of the Earth’s story – for use in walks and group discussions.

A highly acclaimed and respected team brought Deep Time Walk together. The app was co-created by Schumacher College’s Resident Ecologist Stephan Harding, inspired by an educational walk that he has been leading on Devon’s south coast for more than 10 years.

Dr. Harding, who has collaborated with high-profile scientist and environmentalist James Lovelock, wrote the script with Devon-based playwright Peter Oswald, former Playwright in Residence at Shakespeare’s Globe in London. Jeremy Mortimer – producer of more than 200 BBC radio productions – directed the audio, with the engaging narrative brought to life by actors Chipo Chung, Paul Hilton and Peter Marinker.

The easy to use, beautifully designed and highly educational app can be downloaded onto a mobile phone, which can be then left in a pocket so that walkers enjoy their surroundings as part of an immersive experience.

The interactive experience uses the built-in pedometer on the phone to track the steps of a walker and guide them across Earth’s evolutionary timeline. There is also an audio setting available for people unable to do the walk. Once the app is downloaded, it can be used anywhere and no internet connection is needed.

We are in the midst of a silent revolution, that’s happening all around the world. Athletes, artists, entrepreneurs, scientists, hackers and activists are all waking up to higher stages of consciousness and the real work to be done. From the rainforests of Peru to the desert of Burning Man, from the dance floors of Ibiza to the mountainsides of Bhutan, we are self-initiating into the 21st century Mysteries–but the question remains, what are we supposed to do with all of this knowledge?

In the past, breakthroughs like this have always ended in one of two ways–either the priests sniff out the party and violently shut it down, or the Prometheans, those who have stolen the fire from the gods, screw it up and put the rocketship in the ditch.

It’s time to upgrade our operating system so that we can handle the information and the responsibilities that come with our collective initiation. We may have figured out how to throw the Party at the End of Time–we’re better than ever at getting high–but now comes the harder part–how to stay that way.

For one week at the magical and storied Tyringham Estate, we will be diving into that very question, sharing techniques and practices, training, reflecting and celebrating what an upgraded OS can look and feel like. This retreat is not for perpetual seekers or magical thinkers–it’s for those people who have woken up to their true nature, who are ready to take radical responsibility for their own evolution and to play their part in the unfolding story, full out, and without reservation.

If you have struggled trying to balance your peak breakthroughs with your day to day life and responsibilities, if you’ve wished there were cleaner frameworks and interpretations than the New Age claptrap getting peddled as wisdom, and if you’ve craved deep and committed connections with fellow travellers, join us. It has already begun.

Could the war on drugs (and therefore hallucinogens) be limiting human creativity at a crucial time? Environmentalist Matt Mellen places the efforts of the Ayahuasca Defence Fund within a broader historical narrative.

“Man is the most insane species. He worships an invisible God and destroys a visible Nature. Unaware that this Nature he’s destroying is this God he’s worshiping.”

Hubert Reeves

Pushing back against the War on the World

Planet earth has been held hostage by a death cult for 2000 years. We have lived our lives immersed in a dominant culture that operates on the basis that the human species is separate from nature and exempt from the rules of ecology. This madness underlies many of the critical challenges now faced by our species, not least: climate change, the Sixth Mass Extinction event and an economy that treats its participants like machines enlisted in the mindless destruction of our home planet. The historical routes of this pervasive, expansive and violent ideology are widely documented but deeply misunderstood.

Today, all around the world, networks of connected people are coordinating their efforts to push back against the machine-mind and restore some kind of new balance and harmony to a global system that teeters out of control and nears collapse. This global “blessed unrest” is colourful, diverse, indigenous, earthy, plant-powered, feminine, vital and urgent. The Ayahuasca Defence Fund is a new opportunity to co-create some of the changes we need to see that can help to shift humanity back into a more healthy relationship with the natural world. Your participation is invited.

The War on Drugs is one way in which machine culture regiments and contains the natural freedoms, creative exuberance and visions of humanity. Since the 1960s it has specifically and explicitly sought to shut down citizens’ access to hallucinogens. This containment has been rationalised under mass-propagated, misinformation about health and safety. This deceit is increasingly untenable as pioneering new research catalogues the demonstrable, repeatable and statistically highly-significant range of positive benefits these substances offer human beings.

The Beckley Foundation is leading a new wave of scientific research into psychedelics. Their recent findings demonstrate that magic mushrooms can cure treatment-resistant depression far better than any synthetic compound. In some cases, one intervention is enough for a profound life-improving event. Elsewhere, we learn that Iboga can cure hardcore drug addicts. Cannabis oil can cure certain types of cancer and MDMA treats PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder). However, more than this, beyond their therapeutic functions – “plant medicines” are offering a new generation of adventurer the opportunity to alter their consciousness and experience existence in new ways that can often offer insights and opportunities for creativity and growth that supplement and enhance our normal modes of operation. For many, these represent significant life events, rites of passage, powerful awakenings and even glimpses of the divine. Could the restriction of these exotic substances represent some kind of cultural lobotomy limiting our abilities to envision new futures and evolve and update culture precisely when we need to be doing these things most?

A new, global, civil rights movement

Gaia by Alex Grey

Front and central in this new psychedelic renaissance is the “Spirit Vine” known as Ayahuasca. In his book The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge, Jeremy Narby documents how this remarkable compound came to exist via the ingenious botanical alchemy of Amazonian tribal people following direct communication with plant intelligence. Shamans in the Amazon have used versions of this substance for centuries to cure ailments as well as access new knowledge about their environment and the cosmos and to channel wisdom to their communities. In recent times, increasing numbers of Western people are also seeking access to the benefits on offer. In doing so, they put themselves at loggerheads with international law enforcement agencies that increasingly represent corporate interests, repress decent and maintain the catastrophic status quo. If at the global level these plant medicines can play some role in re-integrating humanity back into our planet’s natural life-support systems then these oppressive laws may be the noose we hang around our species’ neck.

The stage is set for a new, global, civil rights movement. On one side, sits the entrenched establishment clinging to out-dated modalities of Descartian separation, limited and depressing visions of the future and sick obsessions with continuous economic growth, militarism and incarceration. Rising up in celebratory dissent are: activists, environmentalists, indigenous people, health workers as well as a diverse variety of people claiming sovereignty of their own conscious states and keen to connect intimately and directly with other realms. Unknown to many, this resurgent spirit is as ancient and primal as its eruption is now urgent and raw. This new global negotiation is part of a historical meta-narrative that dates back to the foundations of Western culture, the emergence of monotheism, patriarchy, salvationism and the ensuing war against the world waged by a violent emergence of religious people enthralled to an extraterrestrial “big daddy” God. Hanging in the balance is who gets to decide what each of us does with our minds? The answer to that questions may shape the destiny of life on our planet.

Indigenous world views and “teacher plants”

For ancient indigenous peoples, who have lineages that have existed for millennia it is fully understood that they are enmeshed in the web of life and in many cases that nature herself is sacred. Perhaps it is not surprising that evidence of interaction with teacher plants and altered states of consciousness is ubiquitous around the world across myriad ancient cultures. Indeed, some commentators, such as, Graham Hancock writing in his book – Supernatural: Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind, argue that connection with these substances was far more ancient and pervasive than many today might presume and may have played a fundamental, transformative role in the evolution of the advanced human mind and its unprecedented feats of language, art, imagination and creativity.

Today’s dominant culture with its obsessions of hierarchy, submission, toil and extraction didn’t take over the planet by winning logical arguments or having the best ideas but by smashing skulls, burning libraries, banning access to teacher plants, committing centuries of genocide on five continents and forcing it’s virulent ideology of separation, domination and oppression upon the planet.

In his book – Not in His Image: Gnostic Vision, Sacred Ecology, and the Future of Belief, John Lamb Lash describes how ancient systems of thought and knowledge were vigorously attacked, destroyed and replaced with powerful new stories that orientate humanity off-planet, resulting in the miss-treatment and devastation of the world we inhabit today. He begins in 415 C.E. when a beautiful and wise Pagan noblewoman called Hypatia was pulled from her chariot and savagely beaten to death by a mob of proto-Christians as she returned home from the great Library of Alexandria. Hypatia was the daughter of the mathematician Theon of Alexandria, the last known teacher of the Mystery Schools.

Mystery schools, Gnostics and reverence for Gaia-Sophia

Hypatia, her father and many other Brahmins of their time were Gnostics. They believed that all of us are capable of having a direct and profound understanding of our world, God, the cosmos and consciousness and that the knowledge of transcendence can be arrived at by way of interior, intuitive means. The Gnostic creation myth centres on the fallen goddess Sophia from which all of nature emerges. Sophia shares much in common with Pachamama and modern conceptions of Gaia. Gnostics, like most indigenous peoples revered nature and were bound to the land in a symbiosis of reverence and respect and some expanded and enhanced their personal spiritual growth in ancient Mystery Schools – rites of passage in which initiates were guided into deep and profound direct knowledge of themselves and the world aided with entheogens – hallucinatory teacher plants (for example, the Eleusinian Mysteries may have utilized ergot – a fungus on wheat).

The attack on Hypatia was a historical turning point because it manifested the emergence and dominance of a new story explaining the origins of humanity, our purpose on Earth and alongside it systems of thought that demoted our own consciousness as no longer central to spiritual evolution.

The rise of dominator, patriarchal monotheisms

Early Christians were fierce and violently committed to the idea that an extraterrestrial, all-powerful, father-God ruled to pass judgement on a humanity that was, from the outset, cast in sin. Humans were born sinful and the earth was sinful and should be “subdued” and only the righteous would be saved from a torment in hell in which torture could be extended for eternity. These pathological ideas have scarred the minds and bodies of billions of humans as well decimated the earth.

Many people accept today’s mainstream narrative that the major antagonism of our times is between Christianity and Islam. This is a cataclysmic failure to grasp the bigger picture. Christianity, Islam as well as Judaism are all from the same Abrahamic route and share many of the same damming delusions. All three share expansive, violent and destructive memes that have forced our planet into awkward convulsions. Other ways of being in the world may have been suppressed but they never completely died out. Today, people are not just challenging the major religions from an atheist or humanist perspective but also demanding new interpretations of what is sacred. The Earth can be sacred and we can be holy without some extraneous judgement and transfer of power to a bizarre extraterrestrial domain that may or may not contain virgins for our satisfactions.

The emergence of these cults of patriarchal monotheisms could have done no more harm then warp the minds of the early fanatical converts. Alas, within these religion’s DNA were dictates to expand and convert that made them go viral. Colonists, priests, evangelists, Jihadis, crusaders and other bastards have mercilessly tortured and killed every earth-based spiritual sect that dared to be in their way. All across Europe, pagans (“heretics”) were forced to convert or face death. Strong, wise women who could heal with herbs were systematically drowned and burnt in witch hunts that spanned centuries and killed, according to the highest estimates, a possible 9 million women. We look, appalled, at Jihadis today but they are no more barbaric than their earlier Christian relatives, for example, the Spanish conquistadors who roped together indigenous latinos by the thirteen to be burnt in honour of The Christos and his twelve disciples.

Western expansion

The edifice of Western culture stands on the cruel foundations of slavery, colonialism, genocide and everywhere the unsustainable extraction of natural resources. Today’s corporations may be new sanitised and legally legitimised versions of the dominator culture but the havoc they wreak is, if anything, worse. Their international operations are on the back of European expansionism and their principles of domination, hierarchy and wealth concentration have ancient roots.

Those early fanatics steamrolled out of the cradle of civilisation after being incorporated into the “Holy” Roman Empire by Emperor Constantine the Great (306–337 AD). This early fusion of expansive, toxic ideology with centralised bureaucracy and militarism struck a devastating chord that reverberates across all subsequent historical time. Christianity set out to prove decisively that there was one true God that all people should surrender before. Direct interpretations of the divine were anathema. Priests emerged and became more powerful. They dressed in odd robes, carried the cross of torture and sucked up wealth from increasingly paranoid populations that were taught about hierarchy – paving the way for feudalism, wealth concentration and the dominance of today’s ruling elite. Churches were built on ancient sacred sites and people were urged to repent for being earthly – a mortal sin. Even sex, perhaps the most profound biological connection available, became mediated by the men in robes who enacted arcane laws and decreed whose love was pure, who’s a sin and who should be stoned to death in the village square.

When their hold on Europe was supreme the madness set sail for foreign lands where new waves of terror were unleashed on populations that could have had no idea how bad things were about to become. Just as happened in ancient Europe spiritual self-sufficiency was annihilated. Hand-in-hand with the forced submission to church and nation-state was the repression of indigenous religious belief, the assault on all other gods and, of course, a war upon botanical substances that might enable people to see through the convoluted parables and bureaucracy to an independent glimpse of the divine ground. It is to all of our immense benefit that these efforts were not an effective “final solution.” All around the world small pockets of Gnostics, Pagans, Shamans, druids, natural healers and independent thinkers survive. They are needed now more than ever.

A solution? A new psychedelic renaissance

Those of us awake to the severity of the various social, economic and, most of all, ecological crises faced by civilisation today are keen to bring the best tools to bear on this critical situation. If tribal people that have co-existed with their environments for thousands of years longer than Western civilisation tell us they have medicine that can help – many of us are not too proud to sit at their feet, listen and learn. Contemporary deep ecologists maintain that shifting to an economy that adequately values ecosystems will require, with or without the aid of entheogens, our own personal, direct connection with nature.

Right now, while many of us struggle to come to terms with the state of the world, shaman and wisdom keepers venturing out of the last wild places to share connections to plant intelligence are being rounded up and incarcerated. Their torment is shared by all of us working to co-create a new ecological world.

The Ayahuasca Defence Fund presents a unique opportunity for us to pool resources and protect our new Gnostic community as we reunite to reimagine the world. Generosity is key but it is also in solidarity and with hope. Oppression, extraction and prejudice have dominated the world for too long. Linking together and empowered by new technology we can make the world more: just, sustainable, creative and flourishing. Central to these efforts is standing together and saying clearly that we will not be denied access to vital plant medicines by authoritarian states that are destroying the world. That nightmare must end.

The Sixth Mass Extinction event started a long time ago. By learning about it we can take action to make sure we can keep sharing our home planet with other amazing species.

Destroying the world

If you took all the people in the world and put them on a large set of scales, their combined mass would be about 300 million tons. If you then took all our domesticated farm animals—cows, pigs, sheep and chickens—and placed them on an even larger set of scales, their mass would amount to about 700 million tons. In contrast, the combined mass of all surviving large wild animals—from porcupines and penguins to elephants and whales—is less than 100 million tons.

Our children’s books, our iconography and our TV screens are still full of giraffes, wolves and chimpanzees, but the real world has very few of them left. There are about 80,000 giraffes in the world, compared to 1.5 billion cattle; 200,000 wolves, compared to 400 million domesticated dogs; 50 million penguins compared with 50 billion chickens; 250,000 chimpanzees—in contrast to billions of humans. Humankind really has taken over the world.

The wild giraffes and penguins have no reason to be jealous of the domesticated cows and chickens, though. From a narrow evolutionary perspective, domesticated species are an amazing success story. They are the most widespread animals in the world. Unfortunately, this evolutionary perspective fails to take into account individual suffering. Domesticated cows and chickens may well be an evolutionary success story, but they are also among the most miserable creatures that ever lived. This discrepancy between evolutionary success and individual suffering is one of the most important lessons of history.

Inspired by the New Story Summit at the Findhorn Foundation: a sold-out multicultural, multigenerational enquiry into a new story for humanity, attended by change makers and activists from over 50 countries.

A beautifully and sensitively woven tapestry of the rich diversity that is the human family. Featuring live event coverage and interviews on the essential topics of our time: from cosmology to ecology, from ancient wisdom to current thinking, from leadership to governance, from economy to social justice, from education to initiation, from community to sustainability.

Captured through the lens of both our frailty and our wisdom, our pain and our joy, this enquiry into a new story for humanity offers a gateway into the evolutionary consciousness that will propel us as a species to recognise and embody our interdependence and oneness in harmony with the planet and in partnership with all life.

What if we had the power to change the story, and with this awareness, change the world?

The Annihilation of Nature lives up to its title, painting a bleak portrait of the position we find ourselves in, as inhabitants of the biosphere and the repercussions our actions have on the animals we share it with. Written collaboratively by three of the world’s pre-eminent conservationists, this haunting description of what has befallen us, we have caused and a number of well thought out potential futures, what will happen if we do nothing and what we can do to quell the wave of the sixth great extinction.

The myriad of oppressing forces faced by the natural world as a direct result of human action is undeniable. It is a hell of a journey to go through in 180 pages, a tragedy of epic proportions with the only comedic relief available in the form of dissociative schadenfreude. Emotionally taut, angering, the ensemble cast thrill and fascinate, but run the ever present risk of not making it to the finale.

Genuine attempts to reign in the overtly scientific nature of language have been made but at times the necessity to describe phenomena succinctly overrides the layman’s explanation. This however is all dealt with in the introduction, that acquaints the reader not only with the subject matter but an array of the terminology used.

Accompanying the informative and approachable text are a number (83 so I’m told) of beautiful wildlife photographs taken by a range of talent photographers, sublimely illustrating the natural beauty we run the very real risk of losing permanently.

There is hope but it is not without terror. The whole book is emotionally charged and with good reason but it is on the final page that you will find a statement that puts into stark contrast what we are at risk of losing, “does civilisation have the will and wisdom to change our way and permitting adequate living room for our only known companions in the universe?”.

As every age has looked back at its forebears with moral incredulity and repugnant disdain for now unthinkable actions and beliefs. We too are going to be viewed very poorly through the prism of history if we fail to not only act individually but through collective action inspire the global change in perception necessary to continue to maintain the diversity keeps the whole shit show on the road.

There is a line of thought that goes a little something like this; The Earth has been around for a very long time, as has life in one form or another. 99% of the species that have ever existed are now extinct. Man kind is just another one of those species. The only exception being that we are willfully hurtling towards extinction due to an overconfidence in our own intelligence. The planet is big enough and old enough to take care of itself, and if we’re too stupid to help ourselves out then we deserve everything that’s coming. We have to remember everything is temporary in celestial timeframes.

Extinction is both an inevitable part of natural evolutionary progression and the definitive, irreversible end point to something billions of years in the making. To be so crass as to fail to react given the information is both indicative of the innate selfishness that corporate human constructs operate under and one of the greatest acts of short-termism we will ever live to witness.

The scholastic rigour and logical diligence with which potential actions to rectify our position, have been thought out, is distinctly impressive. The solutions offered in the closing stages of this tome echo a permaculture ethos, display an acceptance that as a species we have reached plague like proportions while promoting the necessity to switch from a degenerative, consumptive and disrespectful society. Instead with wildly diminished numbers (between 1-2 billion) we can hope to become respectful, regenerative and hold the common belief that the planet exists for purposes other than fulfilling human need and greed.

Usually we think of permaculture as a system for land and food, where humans work with the flows and systems of nature. Can we also apply permaculture to societies? To our justice or education systems? Can we reorganize our civilization to live on yield rather than the principle before depleting our most important stocks?

In Extraenvironmentalist #87 we talk about the ideas permaculture offers to our societies. First, we hear from a series of interviews and discussions at North American permaculture conferences and convergences. Then, we have several segments with Toby Hemenway as he highlights basic design principles of permaculture, the paradigm shift they entail and the ways to restructure our civilization from agriculture toward horticulture.